Doug Short's Blog

The latest Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index was released this morning based on data collected through March 16. The headline number of 125.6 was a sharp increase from the final reading of 116.1 for February, an upward revision...

Today's release of the publicly available data from ECRI (Economic Cycle Research Institute) puts its Weekly Leading Index (WLI) at 145.0, up 0.4 from the previous week. It is currently at an all-time high. Year-over-year the four-week...

Official recession calls are the responsibility of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is understandably vague about the specific indicators on which they base their decisions. This committee statement is about as...

Official recession calls are the responsibility of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is understandably vague about the specific indicators on which they base their decisions. This committee statement is about as close as they get to identifying their method.

We've updated our monthly workforce analysis to include last week's Employment Report for November. The unemployment rate beat expectations by dropping from 4.9% to 4.6%, and the number of new nonfarm jobs...

The New York Stock Exchange publishes end-of-month data for margin debt on the NYX data website, where we can also find historical data back to 1959. Let's examine the numbers and study the relationship between margin debt...

Official recession calls are the responsibility of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is understandably vague about the specific indicators on which they base their decisions. This committee statement is about as close as they get to identifying their method.

Official recession calls are the responsibility of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is understandably vague about the specific indicators on which they base their decisions. This committee statement is about as close as they get to identifying their method.

The New York Stock Exchange publishes end-of-month data for margin debt on the NYX data website, where we can also find historical data back to 1959. Let's examine the numbers and study the relationship between margin debt...

The Advance Estimate for Q3 GDP, to one decimal, came in at 2.9%, a surprisingly large increase over the 1.4% Third Estimate of Q2. The latest number exceeded mainstream estimates. The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow™ forecast...